


White sneakers

by Redfoxline



Series: Whumptober 2020 [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Cor is lowkey Prompto's dad, Gen, Hurt Prompto Argentum, Kidnapping, Waking up Restrained, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:55:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26753185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redfoxline/pseuds/Redfoxline
Summary: Prompto opened his eyes to the sight of blood spots on his white shoes.The very same pair of sneakers that he had begged Cor to purchase for him as a gift at the beginning of the school year. Cor, who was neither his father nor his foster parent, but who looked after him like a godfather anyway. Cor, who abhorred spending unnecessary funds on trinkets, but ended up paying a pair of shoes a third of his wage just because they were trendy and Prompto had wanted to look cool.Barely one semester in, and Prompto got them ruined.
Series: Whumptober 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1948477
Comments: 16
Kudos: 94





	White sneakers

**Author's Note:**

> This one-shot was written for the Whumptober Challenge 2020 day 1 and 2, themes 'Let's hangout sometimes' and 'In the hands of the enemy', chosen prompts 'Waking up Restrained' and 'Kidnapping'.

Prompto opened his eyes to the sight of blood spots on his white shoes.

The very same pair of sneakers that he had begged Cor to purchase for him as a gift at the beginning of the school year. Cor, who was neither his father nor his foster parent, but who looked after him like a godfather anyway. Cor, who abhorred spending unnecessary funds on trinkets, but ended up paying a pair of shoes a third of his wage just because they were trendy and Prompto had wanted to look cool. He had made him promise to take good care of it, at the very least, because it was useless to spend this amount of money in mere _shoes_ if they didn't last the whole school year at least.

Barely one semester in, and Prompto got them ruined.

His internal laments were cut out by pain. Like a wake-up call, his brain finally registered that he was sitting in a very uncomfortable chair. Around him, nothing but plain, dented walls of some sort of warehouse. The door was locked, a brand new padlock glistening in the beam of sunlight.

Fear rose in his throat like bile.

Prompto lurched against the ropes binding him, straining his neck to get a better look through the window. He could barely see the top of some skyscrapers further away, and the sky. Was he that high? Was he in some kind of abandoned parking lot?

There was a district full of this kind of building near the checkpoint entrance of Insomnia. Prompto had never set foot in this area. It was rumoured to be haunted by the old people in the Niff District. Noctis had promised him it only was an urban legend, that it was empty because no one wanted to build a house this close to the gates, where fights would happen should deamons or niffelheim army sneak past the Wall.

Noctis! He smiled at the thought of this friend. Didn't Noctis explain to him what to do in case of kidnapping?

"Don't provoke them. Keep a low profile and give them what they want until rescue comes to get you," Noctis had recited in an obviously bored sigh. "Look at them and your surroundings. Try to gather as much information as you can. If you can communicate, try to give as much information as possible about your location. If they leave you behind, keep hidden until sunlight and get to the nearest place with a phone. Only act against them if it's your last resort."

That wasn't very useful to him, Prompto thought. !there was no one to make demands. Not that he could grant any, anyway.

He tried to move but the chair had been screwed down to the concrete. Grumbling in defeat, he looked around for another option, until his eyes found the door and its padlock again.

Wait. How come he could see the padlock? Shouldn't it be outside?

A wave of dread ran through his body and made his skin crawl.

If it was inside, it could only mean that, whoever had taken him there, had locked the both of them in.

After a long minute where terror froze him into place, he tried to turn around. A large wood board had been screwed on the back of the chair, preventing him to fully see what was behind him. He craned his neck as much as he could, his eyes turned so far back he felt they would just pop out of his head, he managed to glimpse at a tinted mirror. From the look of it, Prompto imagined it was large enough to cover most of the wall.

His stomach twisted. If there was a door to access the other side, it probably was right behind him.

How many were they? Were they watching him? He could imagine their stares burning his neck through the wood board.

The sob escaping his lips took him by surprise. He valiantly tried to blink back the tears but they fell anyway, tracing burning tracks on his cold cheeks. The empty room suddenly felt freezing, extracting another full-body shiver out of him. He didn't dare to speak up. Whatever they wanted, Prompto couldn't give it to them. Not that he would have wanted to, anyway.

They probably expected him to be able to provide information about Noctis, he realized. Maybe they would even ask for ransom. His face had appeared enough times in tabloids, trotting along with the Prince, for them to understand Noctis would go to great length to retrieve him. Too bad for them. The only information he knew about Noctis that was public was his love for fishing and tomato-flavoured chips. No one would have been stupid enough to let a civilian like him get access to security data. If there were in for the money, though, he wasn't sure about what would happen. Certainly, King Regis wouldn't let an underage civilian, especially a friend of his son, in the hands of his kidnappers. He wouldn't pay, though. If he sent the Kingsglaive, Prompto wasn't sure what would happen to him in the crossfire.

Hope bloomed in his chest when his internal voice of reason - which has suspiciously started to sound like Ignis as of late - reminded him they could do it for intimidation. To prove they could get close to the Prince. Anti-Crowners. They would have left him there.

Metal scratching the concrete dashed all hope away. Someone had opened a door.

Someone had opened the door right behind him.

His world went spinning and stopped whirling at the same time. There was nothing to feel but the utter terror blossoming in his belly when the man came into vision.

"Prompto Argentum." He knew what fearing for his life meant, now that his own name had left the man's lips. "Good afternoon, kid. You slept for a very long time. My buddies and I were wondering if we might have roughened up you a bit too much."

The blood on his shoes, Prompto realized. It came from somewhere, of course. He felt bad overall, but no place hurt more than another, so he assumed they hadn't beaten him up that much. It wasn't like he remembered how they got him there.

"Do you know why you're there, Argentum?"

He shook his head. The man grinned and snickered.

"He doesn't know why he's here! What an unassuming boy!". His hands plumped on Prompto's shoulders, all amused attitude vanished from his face. "Are you serious?"

Prompto couldn't get a word out, but that didn't seem to matter to the man. He turned back, leaving Prompto with a bad case of trembling knees, and started rambling.

"What a joke. He doesn't know!" The coldness of the man's glare would have been enough to pin Prompto down to his damned chair if he hadn't been tied up already. Prompto had seen Coeurls on Lucian Geographic who looked less murderous than his perpetrator.

"You're the bestie of the Prince and you don't have a clue what business we could have with you, kid?" A raucous laugh that didn't sound right ricocheted against the walls.

"Guess what? You're a lucky one. We're not bad guys. We don't care about the Prince. He is a kid too, and we're not child murderers. No need to be scared of us. We just want information about a man, and you happen to know a lot about him. Right, Argentum?"

Names and faces flashed through his mind. Who could he know that would have that much importance to that man? He didn't know the King personally, hadn't met him yet. Neither did he know Gladio's dad. The man probably didn't mean Ignis, because even if Iggy was the future Chamberlain, he wasn't one yet, and anyway he was barely legal so he didn't have time to do anything some crazy old man would want to...

"Seems like the Immortal is quite fond of you."

What?

"The Immortal?" He heard himself whisper, bewildered.

"Yes, the Immortal. Fancy that you know him. We've been tracking the little Prince for a while just to catch him. Seems like a busy man. Even if he's the head of the bloody royal security, we never saw him in a mile radius of the prince."

The man laughed and squeezed Prompto's shoulder. Hard.

"And here you come! The Immortal never visits the Prince, but Uncle Cor sure wouldn't miss the chance to take his dear nephew shopping, Imma right? Or are you his son, maybe?"

"I'm not. I'm really not!" He insisted, feeling the man digging his fingers deeper into his shoulder, making him wince in pain.

"Sure thing you aren't, kid. Why would the Immortal spend his time with you then?"

"I swear I'm not! I'm niff! The Crownsguards took me back in Insomnia when my parents were killed in Gralea!"

His pleas only made the man angrier.

"Likely story, eh? Someone like him wouldn't spend so much time with you if you weren't linked somehow."

A series of impatient knocks on the tinted mirror interrupted him.

"OK, kid. I just have a few questions about daddy dearest." If he ever made it out alive, Prompto would never laugh at B-Movies lines ever again - in real life those were downright terrifying to hear.

"Where does the Marshal live?"

Where did-Where did Cor live?

The walls of his apartment were painted with a light yellow. In the evening, the living room gleamed in the golden light. Being perched on the 32nd floor, it felt like being nestled in a cocoon nest, unreachable and above the clouds. Prompto had stayed the night a few times, whenever Mrs Argentum had to go away and needed him to be watched and every time he had managed to snatch a handful of amazing sunsets snippets. It didn't hurt Cor hid a fantastic collection of photography books in his office and could make a killer paella.

It seemed crazy people wouldn't know where it was situated. As far as Pormpto knew, the location wasn't a state secret. He wasn't an important person either. No matter what Noctis said, Cor wasn't exempted from following the rules. If the location of his apartment was deemed sensitive information, Prompto would never have been allowed up there.

"I don't know," he heard himself say, anyway.

"You don't know?"

"I don't know," he repeated, feeling a bit more sure of himself despite the tremors of his voice. "I suppose he has an apartment in the Citadel or something."

Next thing he registered was _pain_.

The punch would have sent him flying if the chair hadn't been screwed onto the ground. His vision turned blurry from the tears and he could hear the man yelling and yelling, but could not concentrate enough to understand what he was saying.

"Think you're funny, little shit? Think this is a joke?!"

"Calm down Dan." A new voice piped in. "Not gonna help if he can't answer."

"Do you know where he lives?"

"N-No." He kept his eyes on the ground.

A kick to his knee tore a cry from his throat. Finger dug hard at his jaw, forcing his chin up.

"For a Niff you're quite loyal, aren't you?" He shoved him back, dirty nails scratching Prompto's cheeks. "Perfect. Then if you don't know where he lives, you can tell me where he works, right?"

"The-The Citadel?"

"And how does he get his orders?"

"By phone -I think he has some by the phone. the secured stuff. And - hum, he gets summoned by the King sometimes."

Wasn't it common knowledge? Or was trying to coerce some other information from him with those questions? He hoped not. Had he revealed sensible information?

"This number...is it his secure phone, or his personal mobile."

A screen was pushed under his nose - Prompto hadn't even noticed the other guy walking in! - with Cor's name flashing right at him. Despite the new crack on said screen, he immediately recognized his own phone.

"It's...I don't know. I've never asked, "he stammered. "I think it's his personal phone?"

"Does he usually pick up right away when you call him, or does he call you back?"

The new man spoke with a heavy accent, Lucian accent. His calm demeanour was throwing Prompto off. The violence and the rage of the other man, that was what Prompto expected from a kidnapper. What was up with this guy? And what kind of questions were these?

"I- we - I mostly text him and he calls me back."

They couldn't do anything with that kind of information, right?

Wrong.

Wrong, he realized, when the new guy threw a punch and took a picture of his crying face.

Wrong, he realized, when he made a show of tapping the 'send' button. The tiny arrow icon flashed blue a few times before the picture was sent to Cor.

Wrong, wrong, wrong wrong...

Seconds grained like sand into an hourglass, stretching as they fell, until the screen lighted up back to life, displaying the text as 'read'.

Immediately his phone started vibrating.

He didn't need to see the ID to know who was calling. The cruel smile spreading on the new guy's face was telling enough. Before he could do or say anything, though, the two men left and snapped shut the door behind them. He strained his ears but quickly gave up. Walls of concrete didn't let pass many sounds, let alone distinct conversation.

With nothing but fear and uncertainty for entertainment, he went back to staring holes at his bloody shoes.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I've always loved the whumptober event from the past years as a reader, so I'm super excited to participate this year!  
> Feeding is more than appreciated, so feel free to leave some (It doesn't matter if you're the 'reader of a few words' or 'rambling reader' type, any feedback is making my day! ~)


End file.
